Avi Shlaim is a professor of international relations at the University of Oxford and the author of Israel and Palestine: Reappraisals, Revisions, Refutations (Verso, 2009).

In 1923, Ze'ev Jabotinsky, the founder of
revisionist Zionism, published an article entitled On the Iron Wall. He argued that Arab nationalists were bound to oppose
the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine.
Consequently, a voluntary agreement between the two sides was unattainable. The
only way to realise the Zionist project was behind an "iron wall" of Jewish
military strength. In other words, the Zionist project could only be
implemented unilaterally and by military force.

"Israel, free speech, and the
Oxford Union"
(13 November 2007)
The crux of Jabotinsky's strategy was to enable the Zionist movement
to deal with its local opponents from a position of unassailable strength. The
iron wall was not an end in itself but a means to an end. It was intended to
compel the Arabs to abandon any hope of destroying the Jewish state. This was
to be followed by a second stage: negotiations with the Arabs about their
status and national rights in Palestine.
In other words, Jewish military strength was to pave the way to a political
settlement with the Palestinian national movement which laid a claim to the
whole of Palestine.

The history of the state of Israel is a vindication of the strategy of the iron wall. The Arabs - first the Egyptians, then the
Palestinians, then the Jordanians - learned the hard way that Israel could
not be defeated on the battlefield and were compelled to negotiate with her
from a position of palpable weakness. The Oslo
accord between Israel and
the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) of 1993 was a major turning-point
in the century-old history of the conflict over Palestine. It marked the transition from the first to
the second stage of the iron-wall strategy, the transition from deterrence to
negotiations and compromise.

By signing the Oslo accord, Israel and the PLO recognised one
another and agreed to settle their outstanding differences by peaceful means.
The Palestinians believed that in return for giving up their claim to 78% of
pre-1948 Palestine, they would gradually gain an
independent state stretching over the West Bank and the Gaza
strip with a capital in East Jerusalem.
Fifteen years on, the Palestinians are bitterly disappointed with the results
of the historic compromise that they had struck with Israel.

The
invisible partner

The Oslo peace
process broke down partly because the Palestinians reverted to violence in the
second ("al-Aqsa") intifada
sparked in September 2000, but mainly because Israel, under the aggressive and
uncompromising leadership of the Likud, reneged on its side of the bargain. The
most blatant transgression against the spirit, if not the letter of the Oslo accord was the constant expansion of the illegal
Jewish settlements on the West Bank and the construction of more
and more roads to connect them with Israel.

These settlements are a symbol of the hated
occupation, a constant source of friction, and a threat to the territorial contiguity
of a future Palestinian state. To the Palestinians, settlement expansion
suggested that Israel had
not been negotiating in good faith and that the real intention behind the Oslo accord was to
repackage rather than to end the occupation.

With the election of Ariel Sharon as prime minister in 2001, Israel
regressed to the first stage of the iron-wall strategy with a vengeance. Sharon had nothing to
offer the Palestinians on the political front. He had always been a man of war
and the champion of violent solutions. As a politician he had consistently
opposed all the earlier attempts at reconciliation with the Palestinians,
including the Oslo
accords. His sole response to the al-Aqsa intifada consisted of employing military force on an
ever growing scale, culminating in the use of F-16 warplanes against the
Palestinian people.

Throughout his five years in power, Sharon adamantly refused
to resume the negotiations on the final status of the territories until the Palestinian Authority (PA) delivered a complete end to the violence. He knew that this
condition was impossible to meet; that is why he insisted on it. He treated the
Palestinian Authority not the government of a state in the making but a
sub-contractor who was failing in his primary duty - to safeguard Israel's
security. The great majority of Sharon's
compatriots believed his claim that there was no Palestinian partner for peace.
The truth of the matter, however, is that under his leadership there was no
Israeli partner for peace.

A
long-term effort

While using the rhetoric of peace, Sharon's real purpose was politicide: to deny the Palestinians any independent
political existence in Palestine.
In June 2003, the Quartet (the United Nations, United States, European Union and Russia) launched the "roadmap": a plan designed to pave the way to an
independent Palestinian state alongside Israel by the end of 2005. Sharon's government
pretended to go along with the "roadmap" but its policies remained
completely unchanged. It continued to order Israel Defence Forces (IDF) incursions into the Palestinian
territories, targeted assassinations of Palestinian militants, demolition of
houses, uprooting of trees, curfews, restrictions, and the deliberate inflicting
of misery, hunger, and hardship to encourage Arab migration from the West Bank. At the same time, settlement activity
continued on the West Bank under the guise of
"natural growth" but in blatant violation of the provisions of the "roadmap".

Last but not least, the government begun to
build the so-called security barrier in the West Bank. The declared
purpose of the wall is to prevent terrorist attacks but it is as much about
land-grabbing as it is about security. By building the wall, Israel is
unilaterally redrawing its borders at the expense of the Palestinians. It is
"in your face" violence against the Palestinians. It separates
children from their schools, farmers from their land, and whole villages from their medical facilities.

Also in openDemocracy on Israeli politics and
the conflict with the Palestinians:

Volker Perthes, "Beyond peace: Israel, the Arab
world, and Europe"
(22 January 2008)
The wall is a flagrant violation of
international law. It was condemned by the International Court of Justice and by the United Nations general assembly
but construction continues regardless. It was not for nothing that Sharon was called
"the bulldozer". For Jabotinsky, the iron wall was a metaphor for military
strength; in the crude hands of Ariel Sharon it was turned into a hideous
physical reality, an instrument of oppression, and an insurmountable barrier to
reconciliation and peace.

Realising that time and demography were not on
Israel's side, Sharon and his deputy, Ehud Olmert, cast around for ways of
distancing Israel from the main Palestinian population centres while keeping as
much of their land as possible. The plan they came up with in 2005 was not a peace plan but a plan for a unilateral Israeli
disengagement from the Gaza strip and four
isolated settlements on the West Bank.
Characteristically, the plan ignored Palestinian rights and interests and it
was not even presented to Palestinian Authority as a basis for negotiations.

To the world, Sharon
presented the withdrawal from Gaza
as a contribution to the "roadmap" and to the building of peace based
on a two-state solution. But to his rightwing supporters he said: "My plan
is difficult for the Palestinians, a fatal blow. There's no Palestinian state
in a unilateral move." The real purpose behind the move was to redraw
unilaterally the borders of greater Israel
by incorporating Jerusalem and the four main settlement blocs in the West Bank. Anchored in a fundamental rejection of the
Palestinian national identity, the withdrawal from Gaza was part of a long-term Likud effort to
deny the Palestinian people an independent political existence on their land.

An
unequal contest

Much of the opposition to the unilateral
disengagement from Gaza
came from within the Likud and some of it was connected with an internal
power-struggle. Ariel Sharon, buoyed by public support for the move, quit the
Likud and set up his own party - "Kadima", which in Hebrew means "Forward". Sharon suffered a stroke in January 2006 and went into a coma from
which he has not recovered. Ehud Olmert took over as acting leader of the new
party and proceeded to win the elections on 28 March 2006 and to form a coalition government with the
Labour Party as a junior partner.

These internal political developments had no significant effect on foreign policy.
In fact, the continuity in foreign policy was remarkable. Like Sharon,
Olmert was a lifelong supporter of greater Israel who only
changed course after he realised that the demographic balance was shifting
inexorably in favour of the Palestinians. The idea of a unilateral
disengagement from Gaza,
worked out jointly, was indeed first floated by Olmert.

On becoming prime minister, Olmert gave every
indication that he intended to carry this idea to its logical conclusion by
redrawing unilaterally Israel's
eastern border. There is only one difference. Sharon denied that the
"security barrier" is intended to mark the country's final political
border. Olmert, on the other hand, declared at the outset that the main policy
objective of his government is to complete the building of the barrier and that
the barrier will constitute the final border of the state of Israel.

Like Sharon,
Olmert is reluctant to negotiate with the Palestinian Authority about the final
status of the occupied territories. Like Sharon,
Olmert is a unilateralist. Both men repudiated the central belief of years of
negotiations to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - that giving up land
would buy peace. Both men were elected to end the violence but their policy
served to sustain a conflict that can only be resolved by mutual agreement. As
long as this policy remains in place, there will be no chance of turning a
corner because there are no corners in a vicious circle.

Like all his predecessors, Ehud Olmert
constantly invokes spurious security arguments in order to defend policies that
are indefensible. The Palestinians do not pose a threat to Israel's basic
security; it is the other way round. The contest is an unequal one between a
vulnerable Palestinian David on the one hand and a heavily armed and
heavy-handed Israeli Goliath on the other.

Israel's
choice

Sixty years on, Israel is not fighting for its
security or survival but to retain some of the territories it conquered in the course of the war of June 1967. Israel within
the "green line" is completely legitimate; the Zionist colonial project beyond
that line is not. The war that Israel
is currently waging against the Palestinian people on their land is a colonial
war. Like all other colonial wars, it is savage, senseless, directed mainly
against civilians, and doomed to failure in the long run.

An independent Palestinian state is bound to emerge sooner or later over the whole of Gaza, most of the West Bank, and with a capital city in East Jerusalem. It would be weak, crowded, burdened with
refugees, economically dependent, and insignificant as a military force. The choice
facing Israel
is between accepting the inevitable with as much grace as it can muster and continuing
to resist, restrict, and frustrate the emergent Palestinian state.

Considerations of self-interest as well as
those of justice and morality point to the first option - because the longer
Israel persists in denying the Palestinians their right to national
self-determination, the more its own legitimacy would be called into question. Israel should negotiate withdrawal from the bulk
of the West Bank, not as a favour to the
Palestinians but as a huge favour to itself. For, as Karl Marx observed, a nation
that oppresses another cannot itself remain free.